What is the Pectra upgrade?

Pectra is the Ethereum upgrade that went live on mainnet on May 7, 2025, at 10:05 UTC. The name combines Prague, the execution layer upgrade, with Electra, the consensus layer upgrade. ethereum.org says it bundled more Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) than any upgrade before it, touching wallets, staking and layer 2 data.

What changed in Pectra for wallet users?

The headline change was EIP-7702. It lets an externally owned account, the ordinary key-based account most people use, point to smart contract code and run it. That gives a normal wallet features such as bundling several steps into one transaction, letting an app pay the gas fee, and other login or recovery options, all without moving funds to a new address. Our guide to EIP-7702 covers how this works and the scams around it, and account abstraction explains the wider idea.

The Ethereum Foundation said ETH holders did not need to do anything for Pectra. ethereum.org warns that anyone telling you to "upgrade" your ETH is trying to scam you.

What are the Pectra staking changes?

Three proposals changed how Ethereum staking works:

• EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance per validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. Rewards can now build up on every whole ETH above 32 instead of being capped, and large operators can merge many 32 ETH validators into one, which cuts the number of signatures the network has to process.
• EIP-7002 lets the withdrawal address of a validator trigger its exit. Before, only the validator's signing key could do that, which mattered when a staker and an operator were different parties.
• EIP-6110 moved deposit handling onto the execution layer. The Ethereum Foundation said this cut the delay before a new deposit is processed from about 9 hours to roughly 13 minutes.

How did Pectra affect layer 2 networks?

Rollups post their data to Ethereum in packets called blobs. EIP-7691 doubled the target number of blobs per block from 3 to 6 and raised the maximum from 6 to 9. More blob space gives layer 2 networks more room and can help keep their fees down.

To balance the extra bandwidth, EIP-7623 raised the cost of calldata for transactions that post lots of data. ethereum.org says more than 99% of transactions were unaffected.

What else was in the Ethereum Pectra upgrade?

Several smaller changes were aimed at developers. EIP-2537 added built-in support for BLS12-381 curve operations, which helps cryptography-heavy apps. EIP-2935 made the hashes of the last 8,192 blocks available from a system contract, up from 256. EIP-7549 moved one field, the committee index, outside the signed part of validator votes.

Node operators and stakers had to update both their execution and consensus client software before the fork. The next upgrade, Fusaka, followed in December 2025 and raised blob capacity further.